Uber’s UberRUSH, the delivery package service for merchants operating in New York City, San Francisco and Chicago is shuttering, reported TechCrunch.
The report, citing an email to customers, said Uber would be shutting down RUSH on June 30, 2018. “At Uber, we believe in making big bold bets, and while ending UberRUSH comes with some sadness, we will continue our mission of building reliable technology that serves people and cities all over the world,” Uber’s NYC RUSH team wrote to customers. In a subsequent email to TechCrunch, the ride-hailing startup confirmed the service will be shutting down. “We’re thankful for our partners and hope the next three months will allow them to make arrangements for their delivery needs. We’re already applying a lot of the lessons we learned together to our UberEats food delivery business in over 200 global markets across more than 100,000 restaurants.”
In April, Uber announced UberRUSH will no longer be making restaurant deliveries. The reasoning behind this decision was due to the shortage of drivers. The same drivers used for UberRUSH — as well as the company’s food delivery service, UberEATS — were from the same group of Uber’s regular drivers, causing a shortage at mealtimes. An Uber spokesperson commented on the company’s future plans for UberRUSH. She said, “We built UberEATS to specifically meet the needs and support the growth of our individual restaurant partners. Moving forward, we will focus UberRUSH on powering backend delivery logistics for merchants and enterprises such as grocery stores and florists.”
At the same time that it is closing down UberRUSH, it is expanding UberEats, its food delivery service. According to a recent report in the Financial Times citing Uber’s head of logistics Jason Droege, the company is expanding UberEats in a slew of cities in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This comes as it was able to lodge a profit for the business in a quarter of the locations it is already operating out of, reported the Financial Times.